Also, something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is how every great scientist who has changed the world with their ideas… were usually working off the foundational ideas and experimental data of people who came before them. Einstein polished his theories from the work of others, who also worked off the ideas of those who came before them.

A lot of Americans in particular have this individualist idea about science because that’s the way the stories have been presented, “lone geniuses fighting the world.”

You simply don’t make advancements in science by yourself. Newton, famous isolationist, also worked from and with the work of others even when locked away inventing new kinds of physics and math.

Everyone thinks their stoner ideas about how the universe works are going to make them rich and famous, even though largely most great minds have lived and died normal lives, or even suffered penniless and unrecognized until well after their deaths.